Donald Westlake - Kahawa

“I wish they’d give up,” Ellen said, echoing Lew’s own thoughts.

“They don’t dare,” Patricia said. “Amin would slice them to pieces. They’ll stay up until we’re found or they run out of gas.”

“I’d rather you lied to me,” Ellen said.

“I’d prefer it myself,” Patricia answered, and squeezed Lew’s hand again, this time suggestively.

Uh-oh. Lew had been on enough cliff edges for one day. Gently but firmly, he removed his hand and grasped his other elbow with it. So she put her hand on his thigh.

Ellen said, “Do you see them?”

“What, the jets? No.”

“Not out this side,” Patricia said.

“I’ve got to cross the road,” Ellen explained. “Jinja’s up ahead, I don’t want to go over the lake, they’d be able to spot us there against the water.”

“They’re not around,” Lew assured her. He didn’t mention, because of course both women already knew, that the jets tended to arrive very fast, without advance warning.

“Now or never,” Ellen said. She’d already been barely a hundred feet in the air, and now she banked sharply to the left and dropped even lower. Lew could see a kerosene-lit living room through a curtainless window in a roadside house as they flitted by. The man reading a book on the sofa was just lifting his head at the engine noise; then they were past.

Jinja had seemed quite dark when he had driven through it, first in the pickup and then in the coffin, but from the sky it was a blaze of light; particularly if you were trying to avoid light. Ellen kept angling farther and farther north, and then to complicate matters Jinja Airport was dead ahead, so she had to turn westward again, back toward Kampala, flying low over the little villages, dirt roads, small isolated lights.

“There they are!” Patricia cried, her hand convulsively clutching Lew’s thigh. “Over on the—Over there!” She was making herself angry and panicky by being unable to describe simply and quickly where the jets were. “To the right ! Up !”

“Three o’clock high,” Lew said, ducking down to look for them out Patricia’s window. Realizing he was putting his head in her lap, he immediately sat up again.

“I hate this,” Ellen said. She throttled back, and Lew felt that roller-coaster feeling in his stomach when the Cessna slowed and dropped another twenty feet.

“Oh, my God,” Patricia said, and simply came over and wrapped her arms around Lew and his seat back both. He had no choice but to hold her.

Ellen said, “How tall do the trees grow around here, Miss Kamin?”

“Patricia. Call me Patricia.”

“All ri—Where are you?” Because of course Patricia’s voice had come from directly behind Ellen, where Lew was supposed to be sitting.

Patricia clung to Lew, staring around. “Are they gone?”

“Yes,” Ellen said. “Lew?”

“Here,” said Lew.

Returning to her own side of the plane, Patricia said, “I’m sorry. They just scare me, I can’t help it. I don’t know about trees, but I think they must grow taller than this.”

“After Jinja we’ll be all right,” Lew said. “There aren’t any more big towns till Tororo, right at the border.”

“I can hardly wait,” Ellen commented, swinging the Cessna around through the north to an easterly direction again.

Patricia gave Lew a shaky smile, her face mysterious in the faint green light from the instrument panel, her dark skin gleaming with a sensually metallic look, as though she were the alien beauty in a science-fiction movie. “I am sorry,” she said. “I’m under control now.”

In the Toyota, on the way to Entebbe, he had told her what he and Ellen were to each other, so he knew she now meant she wouldn’t make any more trouble. “It’s all right,” he assured her. “We’re all a little tense.”

“There’s the Nile,” Ellen said.

“So just relax,” Lew continued, patting Patricia’s hand, “and listen to our tour guide.”

“Oh, shut up,” Ellen said, but she sounded a bit less bad-tempered.

Brightly lighted Jinja lay away to their right. Ahead, to the east, the darkness seemed unbroken, but there would be plenty of lights to greet them along the way.

For fifteen minutes they droned eastward, Jinja dropping away behind, the A109 angling north to meet them, the little towns passing with their dim half-hidden lights. Their only route to safety, just as though they were an earthbound automobile, was that narrow line of highway down there. Anyone going to Kenya tonight, by air or by land, would follow that road.

As they hummed along, dark in the dark sky, Lew explained to Patricia the clock method for describing where one had seen another plane in the sky, and once they saw far above them the light and flame trails of a multi-engine jet streaming northward above the planet, but that sighting of the two fighter jets while Ellen had been skirting Jinja Airport remained their last appearance. “Maybe,” Lew said, voicing a thought he’d been silent about for five minutes, “maybe their search area only extends as far east as Jinja.”

“I was thinking that,” Ellen told him. “I was afraid to say it.”

“So was I. Let’s see if I brought us bad luck.”

But another five minutes went by without the jets’ return, and finally they did all begin to relax and to believe they would get away with it. They were past Iganga, past Bugiri, over a hundred miles from Entebbe, with less than forty miles to the Kenyan border. Ellen, increasingly confident that they were alone in this part of the sky, was flying much closer to the highway, an unlit faintly paler ribbon across the black chest of the world. An occasional car appeared down there, moving at less than half their hundred twenty miles an hour.

“That looks like the flashes,” Patricia said.

Lew, his long day ending, had been half-asleep. He sat up, blinking. “What?”

“The flashes, when they were shooting at us at the airport,” Patricia explained. “That looks like the same thing. What would make that?”

She was pointing out her window, down toward the road. Leaning over, his arm against her breast, he looked down and at first saw only an automobile, a Peugeot, speeding along down there, traveling east as they were. They were already ahead of it, and pulling away. But then he saw the flashes at the side windows and said, “They’re shooting, that’s why.”

But what were they shooting at? Ahead of the Peugeot, visible in its headlights, being steadily overtaken, was someone on a small motorcycle, a narrow figure hunched over the handlebars, about to be shot or run down, his motorcycle or moped slower than the—

Moped. Lew stared. “That’s Bathar!”

“What?” Ellen dipped the right wing for a better look, dumping Lew more firmly into Patricia’s lap. “My God!” Ellen cried, “they’re killing him!”

“Jesus! Bathar!” Lew picked himself out of Patricia’s lap and held onto the back of Ellen’s seat. “I completely forgot that goddam moped!”

Ellen was swinging left, away from the road. She said, “Lew, do you have a gun?”

“Of course.”

“The window flap by my elbow here. It opens. But not yet, wait’ll I throttle back.”

Ellen’s left turn segued into a long arc to the right, finishing with her over the road, facing the other way, the Peugeot and moped just ahead, rushing toward them. She throttled back, dropping low, the wheels no more than twenty feet above the road. Lew, arm sticking out the top-hinged window flap, fired three shots as they and the car passed one another, but to no effect. “No good,” he said. “I can’t see, I can’t aim. Run parallel, let me broadside them.”

“They’ve stopped,” Patricia said, looking back.